I agree with mime. Due to the size of their brain, mantids couldn't possibly know about the further results/complications of any action. For example, when a mantis launches itself off a branch, it doesn't think about the fact that it could get hit by a twig, or snatched in the air. It just wants to move, and as with most animals with limited thinking capabilities, it is primarily ruled by instinct.
Pure Amazing!!
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Mime, if mantids were selected to search for spider webs, it would be somehow described, that mantids are specialized spider-killers, who find the web, touch it and catch the spider. Just like those little wasps that look for spider to paralyse it and lay eggs inside it's body. What's more, if it was a programmed response, it would be very common among this species, cause such a useful genetic information would spread incredibly fast.
Hierodula, exactly!
Hierodula, exactly!
Mime454
Well-known member
I'm just trying to put the case out there that a mantis could do this with a simple programmed response without precognitive thought. I did some Googling and didn't find any studies on this, but I really could see this being a programmed behavior. It would be so useful, so useful in fact that I would like to study (in college for Ethology now) why the necessary genetic mutations haven't arrived to make this a ubiquitous behavior. It might even be, because most of the heavily funded studies(I'm only going by what I've read in "The Praying Mantids" and online searches of peer-reviewed journals) have been made by organizations that are culturing mantids, rather than field studies. I don't know many people who culture their mantids with grass spiders.Mime, if mantids were selected to search for spider webs, it would be somehow described, that mantids are specialized spider-killers, who find the web, touch it and catch the spider. Just like those little wasps that look for spider to paralyse it and lay eggs inside it's body. What's more, if it was a programmed response, it would be very common among this species, cause such a useful genetic information would spread incredibly fast.
Hierodula, exactly!
Do I think that this is a coincidence? Probably so. But I'm interested enough to try to study it. I'm going to go get some Chinese ooths from the garden store, because I don't want to risk my expensive mantids on such a study.
Thanks OP.
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happy1892
Well-known member
He meant this one (One!) might be different in that way. I guess that is almost certainly not true. Could a person with a smaller brain than person 1 and every thing was the same (age, conditions (what happened) Do you guys know what I mean? The only difference between them is their brain.). Could the one with the smaller brain function better than person 1 when everything is the same except the brain at that time? Is there anyway it could?Mime, if mantids were selected to search for spider webs, it would be somehow described, that mantids are specialized spider-killers, who find the web, touch it and catch the spider. Just like those little wasps that look for spider to paralyse it and lay eggs inside it's body. What's more, if it was a programmed response, it would be very common among this species, cause such a useful genetic information would spread incredibly fast.
Hierodula, exactly!
Oh, sorry. I misunderstood it.
For me both theories: mantis-genius-spider-slayer and mantis-species-super-ability are improbable, but who knows... I did not carry out any research, so I can't disprove it.
happy1892
Well-known member
Darn, I cannot explain! Well, it is not important.
fleurdejoo
Well-known member
Check out the big brain on Mime!!!
happy1892
Well-known member
His avatar?
Mime454
Well-known member
This would hardly be the most impressive behavior in a predator. Fireflies use flashing symbols to call males to them. But fireflies of one species can fake the calls of another to trick the males and eat them.
To me, this seems more ingenius than a mantis probing a spider's web. If this were not documented, and OP came into the forum saying that he witnessed a female firefly of species x mimic the call of species y and eat the males come to her instead of trying to copulate what would any of you say? If we don't look at this as a genetically preprogrammed response, we would have to postulate not only that female's not only have a memory of the calls of other species, but that they actually have to know what the calls do and how males of another species will react! Impossible! It must be a coincidence!
I've got lots of these, each as extraordinary as the next. To find something pretty damn intuitive in a creature as simple as an insect shouldn't really give us much pause when we consider that Evolution has had millions of years to program behaviors of growing complexity and efficiency.
Is this a common mantis behavior? Once again, I don't know, but it would hardly be the most sophisticated behavior known in an outwardly "simplistic" creature.
